Political Participation in European Democracies - Coursework Example

From the paper "Role of Political Parties in Contemporary democracies", democracy includes divergent political views and the presence of political parties professing different ideologies for achieving what they perceive as the greatest good of the country is an absolute imperative for it.... But between one-on-one democracy observed in such miniature closely-knit groups and large-scale democracies, there is a huge gap and it took entire humankind more than two millenniums to partially bridge that gap (Powell 1982)....

olitical participation in the process has great influence on the development of everybody's character.... It is known that political participation is the "key to the transformation of people from individual (private) to citizen (public)".... But it can be noticed that political participation must not be only defensive and protective measure against the political system.... Some political scientists mention that democracy is individual participation and the main emphasis is how this participation changes and transform people and society in the whole....

The majority of the research studies conducted on participation in the electoral process were unanimous in declaring that the socio-economic status was strongly associated with participation.... The paper "Political Disengagement" discusses that the casual attitude of the voter in respect of political participation, the inefficiency of authorities, and outdated procedures are some of the issues to be addressed in order to increase voter turnout in the UK.... The diminishing participation of the populace in the electoral process has emerged as a common phenomenon in many countries....

The essay "Decline in Levels of Membership of Political Parties in Western democracies" focuses on the critical analysis of the major issues on the decline in levels of membership of political parties across western democracies.... It is disappointing that membership in the parties and activism is declining in the western advanced democracies over the years.... 2010)This piece of work permits an extensive investigation about the levels of party membership across vast democracies in Europe....

Even in modern-day democracies, there are citizens who are not happy with the way the political parties perform, while representing various key issues related to people.... This paper "Effective political Representation and political Parties" would attempt to study the aspect of the need for political parties inaptly representing various political issues.... There are even people who opine that political parties indeed play a pivotal role in the representation of several vital matters!...

Why is elitism necessarily relevant to democracies, which by definition are designed to avoid monarchical or faction-based leadership?... Lijphart offers that there is one type of democracy referred to as consociational democracies with Grand Coalition leadership that is characterized by groups of elite political members who agree to a consensus-based government as they understand the complexities and problems that come from non-cooperative government.... In this sense, democracies are not necessarily dictated by the type of leadership that governs structure and control, so long as the benefits to constituents meet the parameters of effective accountability, ethics, and integrity to better the whole of the state's social population....

The "Globalization and Democratic Government" paper states that Western governments, multinationals, and international NGOs adopted positions and perspectives that claimed greater concern with the nature of political structures within developing and newly industrialized states.... It has been observed by some political critics that globalization masquerades an impending and solemn threat to democracy.... (Przeworski, 1997, 121-26) This elevated amount of experiential vagueness has led some well-known intellectuals of democracy to propose that political scholars can possibly add a little exercise to the discussion on globalization and democracy....

On the political fronts, (Anderson, 2002) democracy is a 'concept or a form of governance, where people have equal voices' on issues affecting their lives and have 'equal contribution to issues that can shape governance policies' and (Anderson 2002) is 'expressed as a numeric value of majority vote of representatives.... s a result, democratic theorists of modern democracy according to (Mitrany, 1975) believe in an 'anarchical society' while democratic theorists of international relations either political or economic believe in democracy....